


Common Sense

by Reeve



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Gen, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 09:09:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7095892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reeve/pseuds/Reeve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Philosophy and the flu were never great collaborators. And when one's senses are under attack, common sense is arguably the scarcest of them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Common Sense

A flu-addled brain doesn’t stop thinking. It just stops thinking well. 

Your eyes cringe at the light slicing between a chink in the curtains, and you can't compel yourself out of bed to do anything useful. There's not much else for your brain to do but contemplate philosophy. 

Or, to try.

Philosophy turns into entropic slush. It starts with contemplating the differences between emotional wants and needs, but ends up being a comparison of Mike and Charlie. 

Beau of yore versus Current partner. An echo of your own character, versus your opposite. Black and White, Left and Right. 

The flu will turn the most sophisticated musings into a gauche show-and-tell.

You hear the door open, and soon Charlie appears around the foot of the bed. It’s a jarring juxtaposition for your psyche, to see him in the brain space that had pictured an old boyfriend only moments before. You feel a flicker of guilt before remembering Charlie can’t, in fact, see inside your head.

“Charlie…” you start to say, but the end of the word is faint and weak, so it just sounds like you’re shushing him. You hear the soft word evaporate immediately. Your tongue had pushed it past your teeth, but your lips don’t feel it, so preoccupied are you with the grated heat of your throat. The push behind your eyes. The blanket of your thick breath after it huffs out your mouth and finds nowhere to go but back at you, with nothing but pillow and wadded duvet having barred its escape.

There’s a soft click as he places a glass of cooled water—half refrigerated, half tap, just the way you like it—on one of the glass coasters at your bedside unit. 

“Thank you,” you murmur. It’s more for the gesture than for the water. To drink from a glass would require you to sit, then to exercise dexterity and balance. Neither of which will happen today. It’s common sense.

Mike wouldn’t have given you something you couldn’t drink. He’d have made some acerbic comment about parching to death—something you’d have thought, yourself—and you’d laugh together over your shared wit. 

You and he had been so alike, in all the ways that mattered at the time. You had rarely even disagreed, let alone fought. Company and conversation had been so easy…

You feel a dip at the edge of the mattress as Charlie sits.

Charlie. Not Mike.

You cough. It sounds like a haunted house falling down.

“Charlie,” you try again.

One of his eyes is half hidden by a dark curl, but you see a smile tug at one end of his lips. You hope it’s a sympathetic kind of smile, because the flu shouldn’t be funny by anyone’s standards.

“Why is common sense called common sense?” you say, the words muffled against the duvet.

He waits. He knows you’ll elaborate. Just like he knows you ask arbitrary things. 

“It’s not common, at all,” you add.

“How do you know?” he says. “Have you surveyed a large representative set, for statistical analysis?”

Mike would have said something sarcastic and funny, instead. Like you would have. 

You see a bead of condensation at the top of the glass edge its way downward, and you follow it with your eyes. For a moment you wonder whether Charlie’s verbosity is to impress or to intimidate. But no, it would be neither. It would just be Charlie. It must be a scholar thing.

“I’ve met many idiots in my life,” you say. “That’s a lot of time to collect a representative set.”

“Does lack of common sense define idiocy, then?” Charlie says, matter-of-fact, as if discussing mathematical theorem. And you suppose you are, to him. There’ll be numbers and symbols in his head, right now. “What is the formula that determines when a person moves from an acceptable degree of normalcy to be among the idiots?”

You inhale—through your mouth; your nose isn’t good for anything—and the breath trips on another rattling cough.

“Mathematicians,” you say after your throat settles, “have no appreciation for hyperbole.”

Mike would have agreed with you.

The other side of Charlie’s mouth begins to lift. “Hyperbole is of limited use in a field requiring high levels of accuracy.”

The wet bead reaches the coaster and spreads around the base of the glass in a thin watery smile.

Eyeing the water, you say, “You know what else requires high levels of accuracy?”

Charlie says nothing to the question, but he looks satisfied with himself. When he moves his hand into your line of sight, you see he is holding a drinking straw. He plunks it into the glass and moves it to your lips. 

Of course. He’s clever even in the little things. Mike had assuaged his moments of madness with banter and repartee, but Charlie doesn't have to. You think you like that. 

You sip from the straw, and the cool water kisses your throat. When you finish, Charlie places the glass back on the coaster. 

He stands, and begins to leave.

“Charlie,” you say. 

He turns. “Yes?”

“I don’t think you’re an idiot.”

 “I know,” he says. “You don’t have the data to support that hypothesis.”

He tends not to recognise a compliment. Not when it's also empirical fact. 

For a moment he looks like he's finished, but then he adds, “Y’know, hyperbole takes its idea from something similar, in mathematics. It’s one of the four kinds of conic section—”

“Get out,” you interrupt. You’re sure you mean it in the most affectionate way possible. Maybe.

Charlie looks unsurprised. “Writers,” he says, “have no appreciation for hyperbolas.”

Maybe that’s one of the reasons the two of you work so unexpectedly well, despite being so different. You can’t understand his numbers, but you understand he fills parts of your life that can’t be filled by yourself, or by an echo of yourself. And of course you appreciate that. 

It’s common sense.


End file.
